Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Alright, this goes totally against the rules I started with, but I'm feeling like a lamer for not writing anything of consequence since the Fat Tire Classic, so here's a collection of news and notes from the last week.

Roommate Hunt 2008 has begun. You may have noticed the note to the right, but anyway, one of my roommates is moving out of our suprisingly-sweet-with-good-location-and-reasonable-rent apartment and I need a replacement. The vacancy starts in September, but I'm hoping that by starting the search early I can avoid grabbing some random dude off Craigslist at the end of August. Then again, I used to be a random dude on craigslist, and that worked out just fine too.

I can't build a bike to save my life. I had a sweet 2007 Cannondale Scalpel I was going to build up for this weekend's race. I overlooked a lot of details (like noticing that it requires a bottom-pull derailleur!) and had to order a bunch of stuff at the last second through IBC, but even worse, I somehow measured where to cut the steerer without accounting for the stem, so I ruined a $400 fork. This may be the most shameful admission I've made on this blog; I actually felt ill every time I thought about it for a day or two. Apparently part of getting over this shame is broadcasting it to the world?

I'm selling a Fox Vanilla R with a short steerer! This may be related to the previous item! In any case, if you have a short headset on your bike, I have a wicked deal for you.

Basically it goes like this --

Cost of fork new ~$400Cost of buying replacement fork uppers with longer steerer ~$150Lost opportunity cost because upper will take a long time to arrive ~$50

So I can revive the fork for $200, or get a new one for $400. I'll sell it to you for $200. Never used, comes with 2nd set of springs, steerer is around 7.5 inches, I think (will measure if I get any serious inquiries). Measure your headtube today!

I have the best training log entry ever. It looks like this:

Hours: 1.75 MTB Mileage: 5 Comment: Lynn Woods is hard.

No joke, Linnea and I did a Lynn Woods super-tech ride on the north side of the lake and the Garmin clocked a whopping 5.2 miles in 1:45. There was a 30 minute stretch where I didn't exceed 5 mph. On the flip side, I had a blast going anaerobic trying to huck my body and bike up 45 degree rock faces.

I'm getting a Honda Fit. It's been fun disassembling bikes and packing them into the Evo, but it's time to stop blowing thousands of dollars a year on a sports car when I could be blowing that money on bike racing. Once I saw a picture like this, it was only a matter of time:Interior bike transport without even lowering the seat? I'm sold.

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comments:

I ruined a $150 rigid fork 4 years ago when I didn't account for the stack height of the headset. I still punch myself in the face everytime I see the brand new fork with the stubby steerer sitting in the corner of my basement.

What's so hard about dry fitting the fork in there, assembling the steering bits including stem, spacers and HS, then marking the "cut here" line above all of that? Why even risk transferring the measurement?

The key thing there is to put the stem on. For some reason, I put the fork in, threw the spacers on, and was like, "hmm, that looks good," with the stem sitting on the floor barely a foot away. See what I mean about it being shameful?

yeah... shameful. Understandable but still dumb if you break out a tape measure and then botch the transfer. But to put it all together... except the stem... make your mark and hack away. Yeah... shameful.